31 January 2024
12 Guidelines to Build a Sustainable Sponsor/PM Partnership
“He wants us to do what?”
Jana, the project manager, just finished her one-on-one with Dean, the executive project sponsor on her project. Jana is debriefing Anil, the engineering lead, on their conversation.
“Here’s the list of change requests he wants.” Jana handed the list to Anil.
“Does he realize we’re almost done with development?” Anil asked.
“I tried to explain that to him; he wasn’t having any of it.”
Anil rubbed his forehead. “This is going to set us back at least a month. Does he know that?”
“I told him. He gave me the ‘Give it the college try’ line. No schedule relief, no additional money.”
“I’m already pushing the team to their max,” Anil said. “We can’t take this on and keep things on schedule. On another topic, do you have a decision on the blocking issue yet?”
“I brought it up again with him; he told me he’d have a decision on Friday. I’m frustrated because I’ve heard that same line for the last three weeks.”
“I’ll see what we can do, but no guarantees,” Anil said as he went to talk with his engineering team.
“Dean is killing me,” Jana said to herself as she sat at her desk.
*** *** ***
For some of you, this story may seem a bit of an exaggeration; for others, it may be business as usual—a frustrating meeting where your project sponsor asks for the impossible, expecting you to deliver. You’re stuck in the middle with an unreasonable sponsor on one end and an exasperated project team on the other. Yuck.
I’ve sat on both sides of the table—the sponsor trying to run a business and the project manager trying to deliver results that help the sponsor. Prior to becoming a sponsor, my attitude was, “The sponsor just doesn’t get it.”
Once I became a sponsor, though, I began to see things a bit differently. I would get frustrated with project managers who hid problems from me; presented bad scope/schedule/budget news without any options for how to recover; or consistently said, “That’s out of scope” with no appreciation that my business had changed since the scope was first defined.
